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purpose

Before you were born your soul vowed to fulfill your purpose for this lifetime. It included plans to seek certain experiences, gain new awareness and complete some karma. You made promises to other souls to reunite for fulfillment of your commitments.

You may have vowed that you would heal pain from a past-life conflict in this life so you have revisited it to resolve or release its power over you. You may have had a great love with a soul and vowed to continue it in another lifetime. Now you are here living! What your soul committed to before entering this body may not be what you want to do.

What if you are ready to change or let go of those vows? What if you want to make some new commitments? How do you do it without the old vow continuing to pull you back to the original plan? The old vows need to be released to make room for the new ones. When you approach your soul’s vows consciously, it shifts what you call-in to experience in your day-to-day and the big picture of your life.

The astrological energy leading up to the Solar Eclipse on August 21st 2017 is focused on ending, updating and creating new vows. That means it is a potent time to work with your vows while supported by the universe.

There are 3-steps to prepare to update soul vows. They also support your intuitive clarity:

Clean Out Your Aura

Align to Your Higher Self (soul essence)

Fill-in with Intentional Energy

Once you have taken the 3 steps preparing for clarity, take time to write down or think through what vows you have made to in your relationships, your body, your home, your work, your economic experience, your sense of purpose. Then ask yourself, “Is this commitment in alignment with who I am now? Is this vow needing change or is it great as-is?” You may feel the response in your body, a softening or a tightening of the belly. Listen.

With that information, notice the vows that create a tightening in your body or that you know are not in-alignment with your present or desired soul experience. Scan for what is out of alignment, toss some options to your soul Self and see which bring a softening to your belly (3rd chakra).

Ask yourself, “Does this agreement feel balanced? Does this vow honor my higher self? What does it feel like if I give myself permission to let it go? To change it? Am I complete with this commitment?”

Where vows are shifting with your Self, there is both the spiritual aspect and the physical action. Spiritually you can call on your higher self to update these vows. I will go into depth on this in a short course starting in June (click here for course info).

Soul vows are a choice, conscious or unconscious. A commitment that you need to refresh/keep current regularly, even in the best of times, so they don’t become stale, outdated or even harmful. Take advantage of this magical time to support the reset of your vows leading up to the Solar Eclipse of August 21st 2017.

What do you think you would feel if you knew your purpose? How would that change the way you engage in your life? Do you believe it would put your mind or heart at ease? Or give you a deep sense of fulfillment? What do you believe it would change in your life?

Many clairvoyant clients want to know, “What is my purpose?”

Imagine the sensation of knowing you are on the right path, of clearly explaining to others your purpose in words that they understand. Imagine getting up every morning knowing your purpose is the foundation of all that you do. This thought feels sooo good.

Your purpose may lead you to make a difference in the world, or achieve measurable success. The problem with the concept of your life’s purpose is that it comes with expectation. By living your purpose you expect you won’t have struggles, challenges, or times when you have to wait until Spirit speaks.

The thing is your soul has an agenda when you are born. Some call it destiny. The soul’s agenda is focused on what it wants to learn, needs to fulfill from past commitments, or desires to experience in this lifetime. Your soul does not have the concept of finding a purpose.

Knowing your purpose is not the secret that will bring you peace. It is the other way around. Being at peace with your Self and your choices, allows purpose to reveal itself in your life.

Over Memorial Day weekend I spent time in Taos, New Mexico where I visited the Mable Dodge Luhan House and went to an exhibit of her life. She was a muse of such profound magnitude. Her passion for art and connection drew many artists from around the world to the beauty of New Mexico where they were inspired to create at levels they never had before.

When I was visiting her home, inspired by the courageous life she lived, I noticed how in retrospect you can see her life purpose. While she was alive it may have seemed that since she wasn’t a renowned artist herself, her role wasn’t that important. Yet she impacted the world of art and the preservation of Native American culture through creating connections and relationships in ways that changed history.

When I first discovered her house I was at a writing workshop, in the beginning of my spiritual awakening, freshly divorced and deep in the throes of healing my past. My eyes were focused on understanding what got me there and why. I was seeking my purpose. Writing had always been deeply fulfilling to me. I wondered if being a writer was my purpose.

Nearly two decades later I see my life purpose from a very different perspective. I don’t believe purpose is an external experience. I trust that by being at peace with my essence, feeling at peace regardless of the outside circumstances, I can be purposeful in whatever I choose to experience.

After I die people may say, “Natalie’s life purpose was to…” They determined my purpose based on one notable aspect of the impact my life made. The outsider doesn’t know everything my soul was busy learning or the complex purpose of this life for my soul.

At the moment, my soul wants to teach peace. Not at university, not in social uprising, not as a regimen. I want to teach peace as the path to soul freedom. Peace with the Self. Peace with living, aging, grieving, not knowing. Peace with success, fame, and failure, the shadow. Peace with the body, peace of mind, peace in loving, peace in letting go. Peace the soul can take with you when you die.

I’m not sure this can be taught but my prayer for you is to find peace and make from that whatever purpose you desire.

When you fall in love a lot of what attracts you to your beloved are matching beliefs, wounds and behaviors. They feel familiar. Will you continue repeating generational and personal patterns, or choose to change them?

The terms of your soul agreement are established in the early stages of courting. Some may even be in place from past lives your souls shared. Over time these agreements evolve through changes in commitment, communication and behaviors.

Yet some aspects of your soul agreement are operating based on old beliefs, wounds or past life unresolved experiences that brought you together.

For example one partner comes to the relationship with a family belief that prosperity requires stress, effort and hard work to obtain and maintain. This survival level wound has him working long hours to provide a lifestyle that he doesn’t get to enjoy, while resentment builds for his wife who seems to get all the benefits and doesn’t seem to be working as hard.

His wife has a matching wound. It is a wound to her personal power. She believes she will be punished if she exerts her power to manifest prosperity. As a child she was repeatedly reprimanded by her mother for using her power to get what she wanted. So she has chosen a career that doesn’t allow her to express her power.

When she takes steps to heal that wound she decides to make a career change to feel more empowered. Her husband encourages her. Yet because he believes that it is hard to generate prosperity, he influences her to take a job that is hard for her. It doesn’t fit her nature and she continues to feel disempowered.

On the surface it looks like they are working together to support the change in their soul agreement around prosperity but unconsciously the old pattern is still playing out. Until their matching soul level wounds and beliefs are released, the pattern will keep rearing its head in different forms in their relationship. Keeping them stuck in the lack of true prosperity and creating tension.

As your relationship with your beloved grows, your beliefs and old wounds have an opportunity to shift. Your soul agreement needs to be updated along the way. You came together for a purpose. The connection needs a renewed purpose to thrive. When you ask to see, heal and shift outdated aspects of your soul agreement you create new purpose to thrive in love and partnership.

I offer couple’s soul agreement readings with both partners present. It takes an immense courage for two people to look directly at their relationship agreement. It is a very powerful soul freeing evolutionary step.

The day dawned and I saw the tasks before me. My heart wasn’t in it. My mind was busy trying to figure out how to return to peace. I was in an existential crisis. All felt meaningless. Not knowing what else to do I resorted to the reboot button. I went out into my backyard and lay in the grass on the earth, staring up at the sky allowing Earth to absorb the suffering of all humanity held in my bones.

Slowly the solid slightly damp ground beneath my body started breathing with me. Earth is so deeply wise in its transformation of what falls upon it into loam. My mind’s attachment dissolved, disillusion. Earth absorbing all of my need to find meaning, explanations, understanding, belief, disbelief, purpose. In the presence of such vast, enduring simplicity my yearnings are a pinprick.

I let it go. Not even claiming to know what “it” I’m letting go. Human suffering? Grief for all the suffering my psychic eyes see? All that cannot and will not be healed, fixed, resolved in this lifetime? Everything that is in-between me and Being-ness. So that I can walk back to the world of, this-equals-that: time-equals-pay, money-equals-options, healing-equals-happiness. For a moment I’m not sure what I believe. Believing seems like a way to make myself feel safe when truthfully the entirety of existence is unfathomably complex.

On this patch of dirt and grass, looking up at the sky crisscrossed with power lines above my backyard, contemplating life’s mystery. I know this much, I need nature. Earth is my lifeline. It does more than ground me. It heals me. It allows the unknown to be unknowable. It allows my mind to stop. It opens my heart. It dissolves all attempts to avoid The Divine Mystery’s call.

I danced the night before this existential crisis at Rhythm Sanctuary. I felt discomfort, my body wanted to loosen. I was impatient with the sounds. They felt too slow and jolting. I wanted to dive in to the fire, but it was only sticks, then a spark of flint. The wood was wet and taking time to ignite. When the fire caught, my body felt rhythmic and alive. I trusted my body and it moved in all the worshipful, tribal, ecstatic ways it wanted. But my brain was still engaged. It was only when my brain stopped noticing my dance that I enjoyed how I felt.

My underlying problem is that I spend too much time in the place where my brain is noticing. The brain noticing is critical and comparative, it wants an answer. It wants to know what to do to get to pleasure. The brain can’t get to pleasure. The brain has to lay on Earth and recognize it is simply a different form of dust. Match vibrations with eternity.

The brain must surrender its role as the keeper of the human body. It is CEO, it has enough information to lead but not the capacity that the heart has to feel, the womb has to surrender and merge, the belly has to propel. The brain wants to figure it out. It doesn’t do well with what can’t be measured and decided. Its job is to decide, to analyze.

All misery comes from my brain yet it is my best ally. I want to train my brain to recognize when it’s trying to fix or solve something that is out of its expertise. I want it to advise me to take council with the heart, to check in with my pleasure center, to ask the skin, the womb, the voice what they have to say. The brain struggles to find pleasure. It’s not able to manifest pleasure, only measure it. Its job is to reflect on the other aspects of me that are creating sensations through life experiences. Then select the best option.

In an existential crisis my brain has nothing to work with. All the facts aren’t facts. They are feelings, sensations, knowingness that comes from the body. There is no decision to be made. No action to take. It is a time to stop, listen and feel. Reboot. To follow the rest of my soul’s experiences back to pleasure.

As we begin a New Year I like to apply the “Be the Word” practice I learned in training at Inner Connection Institute. This involves choosing a word that’s vibration inspires me to live with it for the entire year. One I can learn from. My word for 2012 is devotion. I don’t use this word often, so I received it with curiosity, interested in discovering what it meant for me. The definition that resonates with me is the act or state of being devoted, committed and loyal to an intent or cause. I believe devotion is essential to living a passionate life.

What are you devoted to in 2012? Are you devoted to something internal, external, one or many intentions?

Devotion is true passion. The fire of our creative energy applied that manifests into demonstrable life experiences. Internal devotions consist of cultivating some aspect of your human body-soul experience such as physical health, a state of inner peace, increased patience, self-love or creativity. External devotions involve community, planetary or relationship focused commitments to a cause. You might be devoted to growing a tasty plump non-genetically modified tomato in your garden or contributing to the quality of education available in your community by sharing your skills and getting involved in the political process.

The word devotion has a spiritual definition as well, linked to worship, an expression of gratitude to a greater power. Your devotional intentions gain power and solidify to bear fruit when held in the context of gratitude; gratitude that we have the opportunity, time, energy and freedom for passion found in purposeful intent.

Devotion can only come from a true heartfelt desire with a clear focus. Our life gains a greater sense of purposefulness when we are devoted to cultivate internal and external intentions. Like the old adage, it’s the journey not the destination. Having focus, passion, devotion on our journey, draws out the flavor of life as we take a bite, the juiciness drips down our chin. And we don’t mind the mess because it tastes so good. This level of purposeful commitment pays dividends in joy.

Last Friday at our family ranch, I stretched out on the grass in a cow pasture looking up at the pale blue sky. Doing nothing but listening to the sounds of birds, bugs, gurgling water and a breeze gently blowing in the trees. The moment of rest and nothingness penetrated my soul. It dropped me into a place of awareness of all the distractions I’d been carrying in my body and mind from the psychic density of living in the city and the busyness of day-to-day activity. It felt as if the earth instantly absorbed the entire disturbance that had been filling my mind and the tension in my body.

I found a deep inner-peace and gratitude for the beauty, raw ciaos and simplicity of plant and animal life. It made me think of our human tendency to seek purpose. In the desire to find some greater meaning in life, we believe the cultural programming that our purpose is outside of us, something we do, some function we fulfill in the world.

Those things that make us feel joy tend to be attributed the label of our purpose: creative arts, music, writing, activities that have an element of service to others. We want to clearly see what our purpose is and we want it to be fixed, one thing for our entire lifetime. When we experience purpose for awhile through some activity like being a parent, or working on a creative project, then that stage of our life comes to transition or completion; we feel a sense of meaninglessness or lack of purpose again. The self questioning begins.

We struggle with a desire to know our purpose and want a life focus that is guaranteed to give us a sense of fulfillment. We are haunted with a subtle yet chronic dissatisfaction and sense of yearning, feeling unfulfilled, looking for this purpose outside of ourselves. We decide that we are doing the wrong job or in the wrong relationship because we don’t feel satisfied. We give our power to this concept of finding a purpose beyond simply living. We feel disappointment and self-judgment that we haven’t figured it out yet.

It appears from the outside that other people have figured it out. We see the bright light of successful athletes, actors, writers, politicians, healers, musicians. We believe that they have a sense of purpose and are at peace because they are living their dream. Yet it is an illusion. Those in these positions that venture to reveal their humanity will confess they still question their purpose.

We have been sold a collective lie, a belief that if we discover something to do that is our purpose we will feel forever fulfilled and at peace. But the source of fulfillment and inner-peace isn’t a job or a relationship; it’s in our approach to every day activity.

While I sat in the pasture noticing the cattle grazing, birds soaring and little bugs foraging for food, I realized that they were at peace with simply eating, drinking, sleeping and creating a nest. They didn’t experience dissatisfaction. There was no belief that something out in the future, some bit of insight or self-awareness that they hadn’t figured out yet was going to make them perpetually feel better.

A more satisfying focus of our energy, than this illusive question of purpose, is identifying what creates a sense of meaningfulness in our lives. Here are some possibilities to contemplate:

Connecting with others through conversation and touch

Creative expression and sharing our creations with others

Having interests that keep us curious to know more

Setting goals that are attainable

Teaching, parenting, learning, nurturing

Knowing we have friends to call on when in need

Spending time outdoors or creating a beautiful sanctuary in our home

The belief that we haven’t figured out or are not living our purpose, denies our power to create a meaningful life. It leads us to focus on people or activities outside of ourselves that we think are to blame for our lack of satisfaction and to judge ourselves. The deeper need behind the quest to find our life purpose is our desire for fulfillment. Sustainable inner-peace comes from choosing what inspires, expands and energizes us day-to-day.

How many times have you tried something that didn’t work out the way you thought it would? A relationship, job, diet, investment, project or goal that failed. We assume that whatever we tried was a failure because it didn’t end with results that we had in mind when we started. This translates into distrust of our intuition.

When we say yes to something and head down the path, our yes quickly becomes defined by our projections of how it is supposed to turn out or take form. It feels good to have a plan and move toward what feels purposeful, a direction that will help us achieve something greater than we are now.

The issue with most failed plans is that somewhere along the way a new piece of information showed up, in our environment or in our intuitive awareness, but we ignored it because we were already climbing the mountain and we wanted to summit the peak. We had to summit the peak because it was our destination, and by god we were going to do it, even if there was ice forming on our path or lightening striking at higher elevations. This is commitment and discipline, right?

We had such an attachment to the end result that we couldn’t give up or change our plan. We were unwilling to stop and say, “Hey this journey has been fun, but I see that it’s time to put it on hold, take a different trail, or go back down to lower ground and try it again another day.” We got fixated on the summit and forgot to be flexible.

It’s in our attachment to the outcome that we lose perspective on why we are putting one foot in front of the other. Are we walking the trail without noticing the beauty around us, our head filled with future plans?

True success is born from staying in-tune with what we are experiencing this very moment. Are we self-critical, focused on what we are not doing or wish we had done? Are we afraid of what others will think if we do not achieve what looks like success? Are we so attached to making it to the summit that we are unwilling to respond to new insights?

When we’re blinded by focus on the destination rather than the journey, we ignore signals from our intuition and environment. We encounter obstacles that keep us from reaching our goal or make it to the summit and discover it is less satisfying than what we’d imagined.

The purpose of every intuitive yes is to point us in a direction, so that we will intersect with valuable life experiences. There is no failure in not reaching a certain preconceived point on the path. The only true failure is in not giving ourselves the grace to change course as we become aware it’s needed. It is only in the present, that we can align with and hear our inner-guidance, feeling a sense of success regardless of outcome.

Join me in January for the Course

Testimonial

"Natalie has a grounded and loving way of guiding you to greater self-knowledge that assists you on your soul's journey. I experience profound 'ah-ha' moments during and after our sessions, as well as noticeable energetic shifts resulting in deeper peace and joy. She delivers spiritual insights and information with humor, kindness and compassion." -Jennifer